If you have a paying job and you refuse to go to work, even
though you are perfectly able to and it’s perfectly safe to do so, you’re going
to get fired.
Unless you’re a public-school teacher, apparently.
For some reason I’ve never understood, today’s public-school
teachers are now considered the most important people in our country –
practically saints, if you will. They deserve
ever more money, better working conditions, smaller class sizes, fewer demands
on their time, better benefits, and early retirement, because of the stress of
their job.
And also as a just reward for all their years of
self-sacrifice teaching America’s children.
Constantly drummed into us is that if you care about the children,
if you want higher test scores, if you want today’s children to be better
prepared to compete in tomorrow’s world, better public education is the
key. And as we’re constantly told, teachers
hold the key to better public education. Dedicated teachers can make all the
difference in a young person’s future success or failure.
Where would we be without these public-school teachers?
This year we’re finding out. Most of the above is true; better education is still the key to success. But teachers aren't the key to better education if they don't show up. They've severely tarnished their saintly image this year by refusing to go back into the classrooms.
Many public-school teachers, especially in Democrat-run places,
showed us they are are no more than self-serving union hacks. They couldn’t care less about the kids they’re supposed to be educating. Even though
the science says it’s safe, they don’t want to go back to work. They’ve enjoyed what’s about a year off with
pay and they see no reason to return any time soon. They haven’t lost one damn
thing in the process, while gaining another year counted toward retirement.
Which, frankly for these teachers, is their ultimate goal.
Not guiding and nurturing the minds of our children to become well-educated, well-rounded,
responsible, and productive members of our society. Nope. It’s to retire as early as possible,
with the highest retirement pay and benefits.
For them teaching has become just another public sector job
where mediocrity is the norm, and self-interest is the rule. They don’t give a
rat’s ass about the kids entrusted to them.
They don’t care if they can read, write, or do even basic math. They
oppose any testing to demonstrate whether their students have learned
anything.
They oppose even more strongly any proposal to test them to
verify they have sufficient knowledge on the subject matter they’re teaching. That’s
because so many know they’d fail.
It's almost impossible to fire them. Awful teachers are
protected. Incompetence is rewarded by
promoting bad teachers into higher paying admin jobs.
Maybe all public-school teachers deserved respect years ago.
Not anymore.
Sure, there are still some people teaching in our public
schools who are dedicated to truly educating the young in their classes. They
didn’t pick teaching because Education was the easiest major in college, which
it is. Or just because it offered what
amounts to lifetime job security, which it also does. Or because they’d be able to retire in their
40s with a fat pension and generous benefits, which is the norm in many
public-school districts today. Or
because they’d get every summer off.
I imagine it’s difficult for these dedicated teachers to
work side by side with the
slackers only going through the motions to accumulate enough paid vacation and
sick days to retire earlier. It must be even more disheartening for them to
know how successfully those drones are at gaming the system at student and
taxpayer expense, and making just as much as they are.
It has to gall the good teachers that so many of their
coworkers are in teaching for all the wrong reasons, are fundamentally inept at
their job, intellectually dishonest, and demonstrably lazy. They know that in any other field those people
would be fired.
But they also know that a great many of them have absolutely
no fear of being terminated, and that makes them arrogant – the bad teachers
know they can’t be touched, no matter what they do, short of committing rape or
murder on video while in front of credible witnesses.
So what should we do?
First, we need to get over the canonization of all public-school
teachers and administrators.
Working in public schools does not automatically convey
sainthood, even as a teacher. Once you
belong to a union, you lose the halo. As
a member of a union you’re now just another working stiff on the public payroll
like the workers on the cafeteria and janitorial staff in your school. Or the
people who drive city buses or pick up the trash on your street.
You get paid for showing up for your shift, putting in your
hours, and following a routine. Just like them. If you want to do more than the
basic requirements, that’s up to you, but you won’t get anything extra as a
reward. Do too much and you’ll get called out for rocking the boat. That’s how
unions everywhere work. Teachers’ unions
are no exception.
If the good teachers think they should be rewarded more for
performance and going the extra mile for their students than the lazy slackers
among them, then they need to decertify their union. Only then can the bad teachers be removed.
And if you take out the bad and incompetent teachers now, you also shut off the
pipeline for future incompetent administrators typically drawn from the ranks
of incompetent teachers.
Until they are willing to do that, they’ll never escape the
mediocrity that’s inherent in a union system where seniority counts more than
skill.
In the meantime, we, the taxpaying public, need to send a
strong and clear message to the teacher union officials and members who are
currently thumbing their collective noses at orders to return to the classrooms
for in-person teaching. We need to fire
the teachers who refuse, even after the science says it’s safe for them, to
return to their jobs full time.
Of course, if we try to do that, they’ll threaten to walk
off the job. So what?
That ship has already sailed.
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